Runbook Automation for Service Requests, Chapter 4: Fewer Interruptions
It’s 11am. You have important projects to complete, but you’ve already been interrupted by multiple requests — tickets, Slack messages, and even a phone call. It always seems like someone needs you to do something. To make matters worse, these service requests are largely the same repetitive tasks.
Now it’s 2pm. Just when you finally get back to your project work, you find yourself blocked and needing someone else to perform a task for you. Now you are the one opening up a service request and waiting for someone else to provision, configure, or investigate something for you.
Where did the day go?
The inefficiency of service requests —waiting, interruptions, slow turnaround times — has long been accepted as part of our default way of working. We have learned to accept the status quo as “the way it is” and not question the staggering costs.
How much of your operations team’s day-to-day time is lost to the interruptions, waiting, and inefficiency surrounding service requests?
The loss could be as much as 35-45% of a team’s total time. That’s what was discovered during a joint study of operations teams at 14 large enterprises by the consulting companies Liatrio and DTO Solutions in 2017.
A common trait shared by nearly all of the companies? They each dramatically underestimated the amount of time they were losing to the interruptions, waiting, and inefficiency of operations service requests.
Let’s get started calculating the full costs of service requests in your organization.
This guide covers:
- Methods for calculating the total cost of the waste around operations service requests
- The ROI of leveraging Runbook Automation to turn service requests into self-service
Chapter 4: Fewer Interruptions
“How much would you save if your subject matter experts had to field 35% fewer service requests?
Manual service requests disrupt the productivity of your subject matter experts.
Labor specialization is a reality in any large organization that operates complex systems. Hiring and developing subject matter experts who can go deep on a particular part of a technology stack is a luxury that any company would be happy to have.
However, specialization also has a downside. Today’s rapid pace of change makes the timely dissemination of knowledge from experts to others quite challenging, if not impossible. This means you end up with a few people who have an outsized concentration of knowledge and capabilities.
Even in the best of circumstances, your subject matter experts will trend towards becoming overworked bottlenecks. This slows down the company and causes burnout among your most valuable people.
Your experts were hired to do work that moves your company forward. However, if they are continually interrupted by service requests, it won’t get done.
How to calculate the cost of interruptions from service requests:
Step 1
Number of Service Requests
x Turnaround Time per Request
= Interruption Time
Step 2
( Interruption Time x 120%* ) x Hourly Labor cost = Labor Value Lost
*20% is a conservative number for productivity time lost due to context switching. In this calculation, that 20% is added on top of the interruption time.
Use Runbook Automation to Decrease Interruptions from Service Requests.
Create self-service to enable others to help themselves rather than open service requests that interrupt your subject matter experts.
Runbook Automation turns expert procedures into self-service automation.
First, use Runbook Automation to automate the everyday tasks and procedures requested of your subject matter experts — usually a range of diagnostic, provisioning, and repair actions.
Of course, you shouldn’t expect to replicate your experts’ full expertise (that would be impossible).
However, with a bit of analysis, you can determine a base set of operations tasks that are routinely requested (or essential in case of an emergency).
Next, use the access control and “guardrails” features of your Runbook Automation platform to delegate those automated expert actions to others in your company.
Now, those colleagues who would typically have to open a service request can take action themselves.
Each time they use the self-service is one less interruption for your subject matter experts (and not to mention, a better experience and time saved for the requester).
**Rundeck Tip: What can you expect? Analysis of the Rundeck user community shows us that it’s common for an organization to discover that their key subject matter experts spend 25%-40% of their time fielding formal or ad-hoc service requests (this doesn’t include responding to incidents which can push their total interruption time as high as 60%). Every service request that can be avoided is time given directly back to your subject matter experts.
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